Med School Admissions: Medical School Mentionables

The medical student community is a highly articulate bunch pouring out its heart and soul in blogs. I would like to point to several medical blogs that have posts of interest to pre-meds.

"Observations on the "premed syndrome" and the application process" ruminates about the negative fixation premeds have on grades when facing the med school admissions process. Ros, the author, wisely writes, "you do need to do reasonably well, but rather than being obsessed with a perfect 4.0 GPA, it’s fine to let it drop a little (though not too much) in favor of devoting time to something you’re interested in." This current medical student presents a healthy perspective on the entire med school application process.

Panda Bear MD is currently a resident and in "Random and Random-er" he presents a slice of residency life. You will spend years as a resident. You need to know what it’s like. Panda Bear is happy he became a physician, although he speaks frankly of the resident grind. It is an honest look at what you will face in a few short years.

A much less happy and pleasant, but equally honest view of medicine, is presented in Med School Hell’s "Ramblings on Patient Care." I would argue that the author is in the wrong field, but I could be jumping to hasty conclusions.

Reading these three posts reaffirms that all professional school applicants, but particularly for pre-meds, should seek exposure to the field they are committing to — before acquiring six figures of debt and spending years doing something they hate.

As pre-meds, you must spend time in a hospital, shadow physicians, volunteer in clinics, or frequent other medical settings to know what you are getting into. At the same time, as Ros writes, you need to carve out time for other interests so that you can confirm they are not your chosen profession while providing yourself something enjoyable to do and a modicum of balance.

Comments

I’m happy to read that. I too love what I do and am very happy running my own company. Once I had a job I didn’t like, and it just wasn’t fun to go to work. It wasn’t fun to get up in the morning. Now it is!

Does your business relate at all to medicine or is it in a completely different field?

Kudos to you for recognizing medical practice isn’t for you and getting out of it.

Oh, and Brother Hoover (author of Medschoolhell) graduated medical school but decided that medicine and medical training sucked (and it certainly can) and decided to eschew residency and a medical career. Certainly can’t fault him for that.

There is nothing in his blog that isn’t completely true-to-life. To train as a resident is to be either trapped by your loans and unsuitability for anything else or to decide that the good outweighs the bad.